IUPUI

This webinar is sponsored locally by the Center for Service and Learning and IUPUI’s American Democracy Project

How can higher education reverse the disturbing trends we see occurring: pressures for higher education to become increasingly a private good with students as customers, institutions as industries, and competitive success measured by how many are refused admission? An emerging focus on agency—how people develop the skills, confidence, and outlook to become shapers of their lives and communities and agents of change – can help. Civic Agency is visible across the world. It appears in development efforts in Africa; in the writings of development scholars reflecting on World Bank and UNDP experiences; and in pioneering work around the world on public health, resource management, global climate change, and education reform. Higher education has been slow to focus on this issue. Yet promising signs are emerging, particularly in the effort by scholars to define an emergent “civic field,” and the first Institute of Civic Studies this summer at Tufts University. Could civic agency become a core focus of higher education in the 21st century?

Join Harry Boyte, founder and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship now at Augsburg College, and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, along with a panel of distinguished scholars who are grappling with how higher education institutions can integrate civic agency in ways that go beyond activities towards an identity of engagement, with institutions deeply grounded in their communities and regions and “filled with the democratic spirit,” as former Harvard president Charles Elliott once described his university. This webcast will explore efforts underway at several institutions with the intent of launching an international discussion of these questions.